Sony Online has announced an EQ/EQ2/EQOA -related podcast, where they can get the word out on their products and games. Sounded like a good idea, so I wandered over to iTunes and subscribed.

Immediately, I saw a problem. The first podcast is listed as the ‘June 2006′ podcast. Guys, if you’re going to do this you’ve got to do it more than once a month. News within your company and community moves far too quickly for a once-a-month piece. Even bi-weekly would be better, but in four weeks (without further casts) I will have forgotten that you folks are even doing this.

I’ve listened to the podcast now, and while I found the content interesting, it quickly became obvious something was amiss. All … of … the … participants … talked … in … monotone. It was really, really hard to care about patch notes when everyone was obviously reading off of a prepared script. The only person on the ‘cast with obvious verve to her script was Saphira … who is the executive producer of EQOA. Despite the interest in the reader’s voice, I couldn’t get up much interest in the content. I just don’t pay attention to EQOA. Even Blackguard was obviously reading from a script, and this is a gent that I know can be creative with words.

My advice: Let the folks off the leash. Send them into the sound booth with a bare outline. These are smart people, they know their stuff. They’re not going to have to reach to know what the content additions are, as long as they can be prompted. By talking off the cuff they can give real interest to the listener, and let their passion for what they do show through. Podcasts are as much about personality as about content. Give us some anecdotes about the recent patch. Some funny dev stories from the last expansion. Anything.

You kept it short to begin with, which is great, but you can go 20-25 minutes before people are going to start to turn you off or get where they’re going. I think the average commute for an American is 27 minutes, so anything below that is gravy.

If you really want this to succeed, get a host. Grab a good-sounding intern, or someone who loves getting their personality out there, and turn them into the host for your little show. They don’t even have to say much. Just a quick intro, a precis on what will be on the show, and then some prompting questions to make sure that devs/producers/whoever say what you want them to say. The less rehearsed, the better.

Also, go beyond the official press release stuff. Give us some commentary on discussions from the forums (which not everyone reads), or let us know about a cool EQ-related project within the community. Make sure and put links to the discussed item in the show notes. Make it your job to expose us to more of the SOE world.

Above all, you guys have something no other podcast about your games can offer: firsthand knowlege of how the games are made, and how they’re actually played. Share some of that with us, and you’ll get lots of happy reviews on iTunes.

If you recall last week, I mumbled something about the increasing gap between raiders and non-raiders. Eyonix was nice enough to point out that the gap is working as intended.

Those with orange texted items are still unique and beautiful snowflakes. As the game evolves, the current “to-die-for” items will be yesterday’s news. Everyone will be chasing the “next-big-thing”, and so on and so forth.

Which, to a degree, I get. Just the same, my hopeful words from the last post (My hope is that the folks at Blizzard are aware of this and are taking steps to address this issue.) seem even more naive now. Blizzard is well aware of the issue; they just have no intention of doing anything about it.

Posts here are going to be kind of lite this month. Which will of course be a change from the waterfall of commentary you’ve seen here previously. :)

I’m moving across town, but before that I’m heading westward with my wife for some much needed downtime.

If you’ve wanted to buy me a beer, or punch me in the face, and you live in the San Francisco/San Jose area, feel free to get in touch with me. Maybe you’ll get your wish.

I loves me some Raph Koster. He has a discussion of Ultima Online’s resource system that spans three articles, and is completley worth a read. He references the ‘Playing to Bake Bread‘ article he wrote a while back in the article, and I should point out that’s well worth a look too.

We ended up saying that a given object (which was still defined in a template) could have as part of it, a set of resources. A resource was just a label — nothing more and nothing less. (Much later, in SWG, that team would introduce the concept of resources with stats, but that’s a post for another day.) The server had a list of the resources that existed in the world, and designers could create new ones fairly readily. Resources were things like METAL, WOOD, and CLOTH. But they were also things like MAGIC and PLAYER and other such abstract qualities. 

Anyone remember the ‘DeadEye’ storyline? Called ‘The Cries of Alderaan’, to my knowledget his three part story was initially supposed to be a monthly event. The first came out right after the game launched, but it was several months between the first and second and second and third installments of the story. Since then, I don’t believe they’ve tried for episodic content. Now they’re going back and trying again. The Corellian Captives is a series of quests aimed at characters levels 37-41.

Four all-new quest series will be introduced to Star Wars Galaxies in Chapter 1 that will have you working closely with the Corellian Security Force to help get to the bottom of a string of unusual criminal activities.

Players level 37 to 40 will start out by investigating a simple missing person assignment that will plunge them into a dark underworld!

CorSec needs your help!

What if you’re over that level? Or what if CorSec hates you? Where’s the love? I guess, at least, they’re trying something new.

1 comment

I love Bruce Woodcock And His Fabulous Charts. I am thrilled that MMOGCharts has been updated, and the discussion it has spurred is wonderful to be seeing again.

Here’s my thing though: Were people not listening when Blizzard said ‘We’ve got 6 Million players’?

Bruce’s charts show that Azeroth has something like a 50% lock on worldwide MMOG players. Not shocking. How many people did you think played MMOGs? I am sitting here listening to the CGW podcast for this week, and they’re registering shock that SOE’s got like 5% of the market. 6 MILLION PEOPLE! When EQ ruled the U.S. market, it bragged 500,000 people. Between all of their games they have maybe 1/10th of Blizzard’s numbers.

Again, as Bruce pointed out at Slashdot, these numbers are very stretchy. Any way you slice it, though, Blizzard has won the Massive market. Raph talks more about these numbers, of course. Weekly uniques would be nice.
My big fear is that in winning the war, Blizzard has broken the battlefield. With that kind of success … what’s the point?

Bruce’s stats peg the genre for MMOGs at something like 85-90 percent fantasy. With Grandparents like UO and EQ, it’s not hard to understand why the genre as a whole hasn’t fallen that far from the tree.

One thing I would really like to see, though, is a MMOG set in ‘modern day’, with something other than superheroes for character options. I know the goal here is escapism … but why do we have to run so far?

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